Stand with Elizabeth Warren: No Wall Street bankers running Treasury.

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Sign the petition to the Senate:

"We stand with Senator Elizabeth Warren and oppose the nomination of Antonio Weiss as Treasury Undersecretary for Domestic Finance. Financial reform and consumer protection are too important to fill the job with someone who has spent their life working on behalf of Wall Street banks and big corporations."

Elizabeth Warren has only been part of the Senate Democratic leadership for a few days, and she’s already showing that she will stand up for Main Street over Wall Street in her new role.

Late last week, Warren came out swinging against President Obama’s nomination of Antonio Weiss, a former Wall Street investment banker, to a key role at the Treasury Department tasked with overseeing financial reform.1 Not only has Weiss come under fire for advising Burger King on a deal to purchase Tim Horton’s and duck U.S. taxes, his long career on Wall Street makes you wonder if he’s the right person to help rein in out-of-control banks.

Warren’s message was clear: Weiss is the wrong fit. Now it’s up to us to have her back and tell the entire Senate to reject this nomination.

Tell the Senate: No more Wall Streeters leading the Treasury Department.

President Obama nominated Weiss to serve as Treasury Undersecretary for Domestic Finance. It is an obscure title for an important job -- if confirmed, Weiss will oversee much of the Treasury Department’s domestic economic policy-making, and serve as the point person for Congress on fiscal concerns. Weiss would also be the Treasury official responsible for implementing the financial reforms in the 2009 Dodd-Frank Act. It is easy to pay attention to the big names nominated for Cabinet-level positions, but it is at the undersecretary level where many of the most important decisions are made.2

And who is Antonio Weiss? He’s a lifelong Wall Street investment banker and partner at Lazard. Most recently, he came under fire for advising Burger King on its merger with Tim Horton’s. Burger King structured the deal as a tax inversion -- an increasingly popular but deviously unpatriotic tactic where companies move their “headquarters” abroad in order to avoid paying U.S. taxpayers back for access to the roads, courts, and educated workforce we all paid for. Weiss’s work on corporate deals like this has Senator Bernie Sanders joining Warren in questioning the nomination, though he hasn’t come out in opposition yet.3

We already have too many Wall Street types in the Treasury Department. We need a Treasury leadership that understands Wall Street without being beholden to it, and represents different points of view than what you’ll get from someone who has spent his life in investment banking.

Tell the Senate: No more Wall Streeters leading the Treasury Department

Perhaps more importantly, there is little in Weiss’s background that suggests he would be a good fit for this particular job. Weiss spent most of his career focused on international mergers and acquisitions.5 Now, he would suddenly be the Treasury point person on domestic concerns -- from protection consumers, to financial regulation, to economic policy-making. We need someone in that role with the direct experience and grit to go head-to-head with the worst of the 1%.

Part of the reason Senator Warren was elevated to the leadership is that she has the courage and smarts to set a winning, populist tone for the entire Democratic party. But there are a lot of Democrats who are scared to follow her lead -- and a lot of Republicans who fear the popularity of her message. That’s why we need to stand behind her, and make it clear she’s speaking for all of us.

Tell the Senate: No more Wall Streeters leading the Treasury Department